Maybe all the boyos need is a new picture on the calendar?
56 thoughts on “September 1, 2016: Relax …. it’s almost over”
29 games left in the season:
23 - AL Central
16 - Home
13 - Road
7 - Chicago
7 - Detroit
6 - Kansas City
3 - Cleveland
3 - AL West (Seattle)
3 - Interleague (@ New York Mets)
One sign that a person spends too much time thinking about the low minor leagues might be that you hear on the news that a hurricane is headed for Florida's Gulf Coast, and you're first thought is, "I sure hope the GCL Twins get their game in today, because that's the only chance they have to win the division."
The GCL Twins won their game today, but the GCL Red Sox won the first game of their doubleheader. The Red Sox trail the Orioles 3-0 after four in the second game. If the Red Sox win, they win the division. If the Orioles win, the Twins and Red Sox are tied for first.
The score of the second game stayed 3-0 Orioles. There will be a one-game playoff between the GCL Twins and the GCL Red Sox, with the Twins as the home team, tomorrow at 9:00 a.m., weather permitting.
Oof. In that last moment you can even see when the shockwave makes it to the camera.
Some commentary suggested that it was the pad malfunctioning, not the rocket ... hard to tell from that, but it looked like the rocket went, eh?
Also, disappointed the payload went up - could've been a big win for FB/sub-Saharan Africa.
Yeah, sad to see at the end the payload topple off and explode. Not that I expected it to have survived initially but seeing that, there may have been something to salvage.
FanGraphs has a quick overview of notable players on the teams and calls out two Twins: Nick Gordon and catcher(!) Mitch Garver. Garver was promoted to AAA this year.
Somehow last night I came across an interesting two-year-old Mark Bittman column. I was familiar with Bittman's objection to at-home mise en place from his book How to Cook Everything Fast, but I had only mixed success with the method of trying to prep ingredients on the fly.
I bravely waded into the comments section, which actually was reassuring. Sure, there were some, uh, unproductive comments and attitudes, but it was kind of nice to hear that a lot of experienced cooks had difficulty prepping their ingredients on the fly. I love the idea of peeling and chopping as you go rather than doing it all before you heat a pan, but in practice I've found I'm too slow at peeling and chopping to make it work really well.
I think Bittman makes a mistake that's really easy for any expert to commit--he's gotten so good at cooking he's lost touch with what it's like to really be a novice cook. These days, I think I'm probably best served prepping my ingredients ahead of time and then cooking and washing dishes instead of prepping ingredients in the dead space. And then if I do that often enough, I'll be fast enough that I won't necessarily have to chop everything in advance. But I think it'll take some time, and I need to repeat recipes more often than I do now so I can actually get good at making them.
And I rarely do mise en place because I don't know what I'm making. I sometimes need to take things off the heat or turn them down.
Last week, I was making wild mushrooms to go alongside the pork loin that my wife had in the oven. First-of-season Resinous Polypore (which is one of my faves: like meaty marshmallows), fried Puffball, sauteed Chicken-of-the-Woods chunks. I had just found a bunch of Laccaria laccata ("Deceivers"*), which I had never eaten before, so I wanted to cook up a few to check my tolerance. I didn't really have time to get them clean and ended up not sharing them and throwing them out because they were unpalatably gritty. I wasn't careful when collecting because the mosquitos were so bad.
I washed the rest last night and left them out to dry (but not to dehydrate). Next time, they'll be better.
My point? I'm no good at timing my cooking.
I will state with joy that when I told my kids they were deceivers, the older two started singing this song, even though they've both claimed to hate it.
I've tried this style at times in the past, and when it works I'm really excited about it. But often I feel like I wind up with pretty bland food or feel like it was super stressful to get everything on the table and it's demotivating. Maybe someday.
similarly to AMR, I don't always do much mise en place because I'm making up the recipe on the fly. If I am doing a chinese stir-fry, then, yes. If I'm making a curry, then probably no, because I generally cook the onions first and that gives me lots of space to prep ginger, garlic, other veggies, and any proteins. If I am grilling, there's plenty of time to prep while the coals are getting ready, and in between turning whatever is on the grill. Unless it's pizza.
so it really depends on what I'm making and how often I've made it.
Bittman's advice is about efficiency. Mise en place is about efficiency, but applies most strongly in a restaurant setting. Efficiency is all about what you are trying to optimize. Mise en place is about throughput and not missing steps. In the home kitchen, while there is value in having an approach that avoids missing steps, throughput is really only about preparing one meal, not a succession of them. So a big chunk of the value of advanced prep is lost.
so it really depends on what I'm making and how often I've made it.
That's kind of what I'm getting at. Except that I generally haven't cooked enough recipes often enough to be really comfortable multi-tasking. I can see how it's wasteful to do the full mise en place every time if you're really comfortable with a recipe and know that you have some breathing room to prep some things while the onion is cooking.
I can see what efficiency Bittman is trying to get out of the process, I just haven't been able to realize his efficiency gains. Even repeating recipes from his Fast book, I can't get the times he claims, and I think it generally comes down to my knife skills being too slow. My kitchen is also super small (I suppose that's what you get for renting a 550 sq. ft. apartment) and I'm thinking maybe that prepping the ingredients in advance gives me more time to do dishes as I go, which might help make it easier to do some of the intermediate steps, as there often isn't a good place to stash dirty dishes as I go.
This topic was also top of mind because I was revisiting Ruhlman's Twenty. His first technique is "Think" and he advocates pretty strongly for mise en place, but his overall point is more about thinking through what you are going to do. Which I think is essentially what Bittman is advocating but I am saying I haven't really been capable of executing.
In my experience, I enjoy cooking a whole lot more when using mise en place. And I tend to enjoy the actual cooking, though it's only been recently that I've embraced that as an end in itself. Sometimes I even prep ingredients over lunch time or the day before.
I realize I'm fortunate. I work from home. On top of that I do not work grueling hours. Or a grueling job. Still, for a family of 5 there is so much planning in writing the meals on a calendar, getting ingredients, thawing things at the right time, etc. Once I recognized that all of that preparation could lead to both enjoyable meals and an enjoyable cooking process, it became more palatable.
I do have a dream of creating recipe instructions that make the process more efficient. Using timelines to fit in the chopping and prep and keep the cook working throughout the process. Such coordination takes a fair bit of critical thinking and I don't think it is reasonable to expect most home cooks to sort of do it as second nature after grabbing a recipe from their shelf minutes before they start the cooking process.
Another thing I've been wondering about lately is the problem of wanting to try too many things in the kitchen. When you get really interested in cooking and home-cooked meals you vociferously collect new recipes, new ideas, new ingredients, etc. I have a small pile of known-hit recipes, a large pile of things I'd like to try, a freezer full of stuff (ingredients and wife's Wildtree excursions) I desperately want to get eaten rather than thrown out. I suspect if we all just stuck to a rotation of about 20 meals we would be able to internalize and streamline the prep while still allowing creativity within the confines of cooking those very comfortable meals. Certainly once a week you could go out of the box and try something new, but when I try to recreate a new dish every single day I eventually burn out.
The variety of meal thing hits pretty close to home here. I have my standards that I can whip up quickly, and some of those processes have translated well for other dishes using similar ingredients. But often enough what I think is enough time to prep while cooking is not. So I do as much beforehand (sometimes hours or a days beforehand) as I can, or "at least enough" that I have a head start that the cooking doesn't get ahead of me. At least, aspirationally.
I also find that when I prep beforehand things stay much cleaner in the kitchen. Pots boil over less frequently, dishes are stacked neatly, I can keep track of the spoon I'm using for stirring, etc.
My problem with trying new things in the kitchen is similar but different. I think I would be happy making about 5-10 different dishes over and over again, but my wife would kill me. So I'm forced to try to fit in variety and it's a lot of work and I get discouraged and then we end up getting take out and it's not a good cycle.
A couple of things I read recently hit home. One was that you don't actually start to learn how to cook a recipe until the second time you do it. (I think Thomas Keller may have said this?) And that seems reasonable enough to me. Another one was that someone said if it's 4:30pm and you're asking what's for dinner, you've already lost the battle. Which might not be true for everyone but is definitely true for me.
There are a few--not many--things I feel like I'm really good at cooking. Like hard-boiled eggs. I'm pretty awesome at that. I have a few steps that I go through, but I've done it enough times that I don't need to consult anything to do it. And I'm pretty good with the basic idea of just sautéing an onion and adding some vegetables and maybe some hamburger or sausage, and then maybe a can or two of tomatoes, and some rice or pasta, but I can only do that so often before the people revolt.
So I think I'm kind of going for what you're talking about with getting a rotation of 20 or so meals, preferably with some different spice options so that I can do variations on a theme without much protest. I would also really love to have a chest freezer so I could make some bigger portions and save them for future weeks. Hopefully that will happen soon if we can buy a place. But I think that would alleviate some of the problems of efficiency and monotony--if I make a huge slow cooker meal but serve it every other week for six weeks, it'll seem like a lot more variety than if we have to eat it four times in the next six days. Then maybe on weekends I could be a little more adventurous when time isn't so tight.
And I do have the wrinkle that I'm not at home during the day, but if I commit to thinking ahead, I could make life easier by doing some prep in the morning--like, say, putting some meat in the fridge in a brine in the morning so it's ready to go when I get home.
The 4:30 thing rings true to me in-so-far as it regards good meals. The caveat is that we also have a host of quick meals that we use for dinner on nights when we hit this point (mac and cheese, stuffing+potatoes+meat-on-hand, quick-form tator tot hotdish, french toast, egg sandwiches, etc.).
I actually took note cards and wrote each of the "common 20" things on the card. Then I made a vertical line about a quarter of the way in from the right of the card. There I wrote possible side dishes. Almost every card has "salad" and "rice" on it. Some have "potatoes" some have "roasted vegetables".
In theory I could sit down Sunday with this stack of cards and lay them out in a horizontal line. In theory I could write a sticky note with a new recipe and introduce that into the mix. In theory, meal planning could be pretty easy. In theory I could add "common" cards to the mix over time. Maybe I could add a few per year, especially if the recipes use similar techniques to what I already have in the pile.
Maybe I'll get there someday.
In practice, we have so much built up supply (we do have a chest freezer) that I'm just trying to get through it all. That means there's a little more thought required to plan things.
In theory I enjoy going to the grocery store and meandering around to pick things up.
In practice, I've started using grocery delivery. As a software developer, I almost always rage-quit grocery delivery because their websites are terrible. I'm trying to stick with it this time because it does actually save time in the long run. Time is something I'm very limited on in this stage of life.
So I'd say stick with it! Develop some common things (soups, chili, nice tacos, some simple slow cooker things, some sautés, fried rice [produce killer], etc) to work as your baseline. Throw in fun new recipes from time to time. Get take out once a week - just plan on it and don't stress! Write down your plans weekly to organize your shopping. Make a habit of looking two days in advance throughout the week. You'll likely find yourself using time you would have spent zoning out to prepare some things for upcoming meals.
Note cards sound like a good idea. Notes on the computer never seem to totally work out for me, even though I love, say, using OneNote for grocery shopping lists, and 8.5"x11" sheets of paper are not the best, either.
I hear you on the grocery delivery thing. I've tried it a handful of times and for certain items--mostly pre-packaged food--it works pretty well, but I've had issues with produce orders getting filled as I expected.
Yeah, I wouldn't trust a grocer with fresh produce. I would figure they would be trying to get rid of the oldest produce instead of what I would pick out for myself.
Amazon Prime Now operates somewhat differently than what you're suggesting--Amazon has shoppers that go into the store and pick up what you want to buy. So you don't necessarily have the problem that the grocer is trying to pawn off their worst product, but you are at the mercy of the buyer and how good they are at finding what you're looking for. If they can't find it for whatever reason, then you don't have to pay, but you are also might wind up without a key ingredient that you were looking to use.
I expected that. However, our produce has been pretty good. Happily surprised.
BTW, I actually use Paprika to deal with my groceries and planning. I like the tangible style, but this works best for us syncing things like groceries between each other and such.
Also, on 4 deliveries I only remember one thing being missed, and it wasn't that important.
In fact, I click the "allow substitutions" option, and that's hardly happened. And often we find we have more stuff than we ordered and we aren't charged for it. I'm not sure what's going on, but I can count about $30 worth of stuff that was above what we ordered and we were not charged for it. An extra parmesan cheese block, an extra chuck roast, an extra strip steak, etc. I've enjoyed that part!
There are a few--not many--things I feel like I'm really good at cooking. Like hard-boiled eggs. I'm pretty awesome at that.
oooh. Here's my opportunity to proselytize for Jacques Pepin's technique. The pinprick to the air chamber end and the ice bath are genius and worth the effort.
I'm not yet convinced on the ice bath, but since you suggested, I may try it. The biggest problem for me is actually making ice for the ice bath--my freezer is pretty small and usually stuffed, so making ice is a luxury at the moment.
Do you really pierce the egg before putting it in the boiling water? That seems like you'd wind up with little egg strings in the water.
For me, just getting the eggs close to room temp before I boil them seems to eliminate a lot of my problems. Absent the ice bath, I think it's important to not let the eggs cool to close together. If they're all on top of each other in a container while they are cooling, they're actually sort of cook for a while before they cool.
yes, I use a needle to prick the air chamber end of the egg. It allows expanding air to escape from the pinhole rather than cracking the shell. I have also found that it seems to make peeling the eggs much easier, regardless of the freshness of the eggs. That may be illusory.
the purpose of the ice bath is to get the sulfur compounds to migrate out of the egg rather than discoloring the yoke. I think, from reading this Serious Eats piece , that the truth probably has little to do with the ice bath per se and more to do with the fact that I am (relatively) fast-cooking the eggs, so that I need to fast-chill them to avoid over-cooking the yoke. If you cook your eggs very gently and not too long, then cold tap water should be sufficient to arrest the cooking before the yokes discolor.
In my experience, I enjoy cooking a whole lot more when using mise en place. And I tend to enjoy the actual cooking, though it's only been recently that I've embraced that as an end in itself. Sometimes I even prep ingredients over lunch time or the day before.
Same. Getting proper prep bowls and using them helped tremendously for making meals less stressful. I now read through the recipe a few times and fill up the bowls and dishes with items that need to be added later. I doubt it really is faster, but cooking is streamlined, it feels faster, I burn less stuff, and thus I stop thinking I'm a terrible cook.
I love the idea of peeling and chopping as you go rather than doing it all before you heat a pan, but in practice I've found I'm too slow at peeling and chopping to make it work really well.
Yes, yes, yes. Vegetarian meals in particular involve a lot of chopping, and it goes much better for me if I can get the chopping all done first because I am soooooo slow. Likewise when I bake, I prefer to lay out all my ingredients in the order I'll need them so I don't have to keep going back to different cupboards or the refrigerator for the next thing I'll need. (Plus, recipes for baked goods often call for ingredients such as butter, eggs, and milk to be at room temperature. I usually aim for room-ish temperature and it works out okay.)
Good to know I'm not the only slow chopper around here.
You might know this already, but one shortcut for warming up eggs to room temp is to put them in a bowl of room temp water. When I want to boil my eggs, I find that I get fewer cracked shells if I put them in room temp water while the water in the pot gets up to boiling.
We've also been warming up refrigerated breast milk by putting a bottle of it in a mug of room temperature water and it seems to work pretty quickly.
But I think with baking it's nice to measure the ingredients first because you usually have to be a little more exacting with the quantities. When I do get away with cooking without doing mise en place, it's usually with something where I'm not measuring anything.
yea, baking is a wholenutther topic.
I knead to know if that was supposed to be a pun?
You are trying to start something, but I'm not gonna rise to it.
Rude. I've got a relative like you, but frankly, I think you're worse than my cross aunt.
I need proof that your aunt has hot crossed buns.
You butter be careful. This is a family site.
Things certainly got a little salty there.
of course we'd have a cooking discussion when I can't participate. I read the Bittman article linked, and totally agree with the characterization of Bittman's mistake in assuming everyone can cook the way he does.
In the slaughterhouse I do most of the cooking, but I learned everything I know about cooking from Dr. Chop. Before I met her I knew how to prepare simple meals mostly from boxes and frozen foodstuff. After dating her for a bit it became clear that those kind of meals weren't going to be acceptable in the future. She greatly expanded my pallet, and taught me how to think about ingredients and flavor combinations. Although I feel pretty confident in the kitchen, one of the biggest struggles I've found is knowing when something is 'done'. Done is a subjective thing for a huge portion of available ingredients, and really, really nailing the correct done-ness of a dish is one of the most satisfying things I'll accomplish. As to chopping before / during, I'm somewhere between DocS and mise en place crowd. I'm guessing that we make the same 25 things pretty regularly, and that I've made them so frequently that I have no problem chopping as things are cooking, but when adding a new recipe to the bunch it'll take 3-5 times through the order to make me comfortable eyeballing proportions and chopping on the fly. I'm also no great shakes with the knife. I've gotten better as the years have gone on, but I can't break down meat and veg the way they do on TV. A good friend and well known chef told me once that fast knife skills were only valuable for the prep chef in a production kitchen. He stressed proper technique over speed all day long and twice on sunday. I take that to heart as I chop, knowing that evenly sized pieces cook at the same rate, and that will drastically effect the quality of the finished product.
of course we'd have a cooking discussion when I can't participate
Likewise. sigh Today is always one of the most draining, high-stress workdays of the year.
Classes start, or kids reporting to campus?
Has to choose a health plan.
Heh
In terms of doneness, I like meathead's thoughts on doneness for meat, namely that if you really want to know, you have to use a thermometer, and that meat doesn't really lose a ton of water/juice by poking it with a thermometer so don't worry too much about that.
But you may be referring more to vegetables and whatnot, which I agree is harder, plus it's partly a matter of taste. It's not the most exciting technique ever, but I actually really like steaming vegetables and it's pretty repeatable--as long as your vegetables are reliably about the same size, once you know how long it takes to steam them the way you like, then once you figure out how long it takes to steam them to the right doneness, you know it forever.
29 games left in the season:
23 - AL Central
16 - Home
13 - Road
7 - Chicago
7 - Detroit
6 - Kansas City
3 - Cleveland
3 - AL West (Seattle)
3 - Interleague (@ New York Mets)
One sign that a person spends too much time thinking about the low minor leagues might be that you hear on the news that a hurricane is headed for Florida's Gulf Coast, and you're first thought is, "I sure hope the GCL Twins get their game in today, because that's the only chance they have to win the division."
The GCL Twins won their game today, but the GCL Red Sox won the first game of their doubleheader. The Red Sox trail the Orioles 3-0 after four in the second game. If the Red Sox win, they win the division. If the Orioles win, the Twins and Red Sox are tied for first.
The score of the second game stayed 3-0 Orioles. There will be a one-game playoff between the GCL Twins and the GCL Red Sox, with the Twins as the home team, tomorrow at 9:00 a.m., weather permitting.
Setback for SpaceX
Bummer - thanks for the link though.
Oof. In that last moment you can even see when the shockwave makes it to the camera.
Some commentary suggested that it was the pad malfunctioning, not the rocket ... hard to tell from that, but it looked like the rocket went, eh?
Also, disappointed the payload went up - could've been a big win for FB/sub-Saharan Africa.
Yeah, sad to see at the end the payload topple off and explode. Not that I expected it to have survived initially but seeing that, there may have been something to salvage.
Twins announce their Arizona Fall League players.
FanGraphs has a quick overview of notable players on the teams and calls out two Twins: Nick Gordon and catcher(!) Mitch Garver. Garver was promoted to AAA this year.
Somehow last night I came across an interesting two-year-old Mark Bittman column. I was familiar with Bittman's objection to at-home mise en place from his book How to Cook Everything Fast, but I had only mixed success with the method of trying to prep ingredients on the fly.
I bravely waded into the comments section, which actually was reassuring. Sure, there were some, uh, unproductive comments and attitudes, but it was kind of nice to hear that a lot of experienced cooks had difficulty prepping their ingredients on the fly. I love the idea of peeling and chopping as you go rather than doing it all before you heat a pan, but in practice I've found I'm too slow at peeling and chopping to make it work really well.
I think Bittman makes a mistake that's really easy for any expert to commit--he's gotten so good at cooking he's lost touch with what it's like to really be a novice cook. These days, I think I'm probably best served prepping my ingredients ahead of time and then cooking and washing dishes instead of prepping ingredients in the dead space. And then if I do that often enough, I'll be fast enough that I won't necessarily have to chop everything in advance. But I think it'll take some time, and I need to repeat recipes more often than I do now so I can actually get good at making them.
And I rarely do mise en place because I don't know what I'm making. I sometimes need to take things off the heat or turn them down.
Last week, I was making wild mushrooms to go alongside the pork loin that my wife had in the oven. First-of-season Resinous Polypore (which is one of my faves: like meaty marshmallows), fried Puffball, sauteed Chicken-of-the-Woods chunks. I had just found a bunch of Laccaria laccata ("Deceivers"*), which I had never eaten before, so I wanted to cook up a few to check my tolerance. I didn't really have time to get them clean and ended up not sharing them and throwing them out because they were unpalatably gritty. I wasn't careful when collecting because the mosquitos were so bad.
I washed the rest last night and left them out to dry (but not to dehydrate). Next time, they'll be better.
My point? I'm no good at timing my cooking.
I've tried this style at times in the past, and when it works I'm really excited about it. But often I feel like I wind up with pretty bland food or feel like it was super stressful to get everything on the table and it's demotivating. Maybe someday.
similarly to AMR, I don't always do much mise en place because I'm making up the recipe on the fly. If I am doing a chinese stir-fry, then, yes. If I'm making a curry, then probably no, because I generally cook the onions first and that gives me lots of space to prep ginger, garlic, other veggies, and any proteins. If I am grilling, there's plenty of time to prep while the coals are getting ready, and in between turning whatever is on the grill. Unless it's pizza.
so it really depends on what I'm making and how often I've made it.
Bittman's advice is about efficiency. Mise en place is about efficiency, but applies most strongly in a restaurant setting. Efficiency is all about what you are trying to optimize. Mise en place is about throughput and not missing steps. In the home kitchen, while there is value in having an approach that avoids missing steps, throughput is really only about preparing one meal, not a succession of them. So a big chunk of the value of advanced prep is lost.
so it really depends on what I'm making and how often I've made it.
That's kind of what I'm getting at. Except that I generally haven't cooked enough recipes often enough to be really comfortable multi-tasking. I can see how it's wasteful to do the full mise en place every time if you're really comfortable with a recipe and know that you have some breathing room to prep some things while the onion is cooking.
I can see what efficiency Bittman is trying to get out of the process, I just haven't been able to realize his efficiency gains. Even repeating recipes from his Fast book, I can't get the times he claims, and I think it generally comes down to my knife skills being too slow. My kitchen is also super small (I suppose that's what you get for renting a 550 sq. ft. apartment) and I'm thinking maybe that prepping the ingredients in advance gives me more time to do dishes as I go, which might help make it easier to do some of the intermediate steps, as there often isn't a good place to stash dirty dishes as I go.
This topic was also top of mind because I was revisiting Ruhlman's Twenty. His first technique is "Think" and he advocates pretty strongly for mise en place, but his overall point is more about thinking through what you are going to do. Which I think is essentially what Bittman is advocating but I am saying I haven't really been capable of executing.
In my experience, I enjoy cooking a whole lot more when using mise en place. And I tend to enjoy the actual cooking, though it's only been recently that I've embraced that as an end in itself. Sometimes I even prep ingredients over lunch time or the day before.
I realize I'm fortunate. I work from home. On top of that I do not work grueling hours. Or a grueling job. Still, for a family of 5 there is so much planning in writing the meals on a calendar, getting ingredients, thawing things at the right time, etc. Once I recognized that all of that preparation could lead to both enjoyable meals and an enjoyable cooking process, it became more palatable.
I do have a dream of creating recipe instructions that make the process more efficient. Using timelines to fit in the chopping and prep and keep the cook working throughout the process. Such coordination takes a fair bit of critical thinking and I don't think it is reasonable to expect most home cooks to sort of do it as second nature after grabbing a recipe from their shelf minutes before they start the cooking process.
Another thing I've been wondering about lately is the problem of wanting to try too many things in the kitchen. When you get really interested in cooking and home-cooked meals you vociferously collect new recipes, new ideas, new ingredients, etc. I have a small pile of known-hit recipes, a large pile of things I'd like to try, a freezer full of stuff (ingredients and wife's Wildtree excursions) I desperately want to get eaten rather than thrown out. I suspect if we all just stuck to a rotation of about 20 meals we would be able to internalize and streamline the prep while still allowing creativity within the confines of cooking those very comfortable meals. Certainly once a week you could go out of the box and try something new, but when I try to recreate a new dish every single day I eventually burn out.
The variety of meal thing hits pretty close to home here. I have my standards that I can whip up quickly, and some of those processes have translated well for other dishes using similar ingredients. But often enough what I think is enough time to prep while cooking is not. So I do as much beforehand (sometimes hours or a days beforehand) as I can, or "at least enough" that I have a head start that the cooking doesn't get ahead of me. At least, aspirationally.
I also find that when I prep beforehand things stay much cleaner in the kitchen. Pots boil over less frequently, dishes are stacked neatly, I can keep track of the spoon I'm using for stirring, etc.
My problem with trying new things in the kitchen is similar but different. I think I would be happy making about 5-10 different dishes over and over again, but my wife would kill me. So I'm forced to try to fit in variety and it's a lot of work and I get discouraged and then we end up getting take out and it's not a good cycle.
A couple of things I read recently hit home. One was that you don't actually start to learn how to cook a recipe until the second time you do it. (I think Thomas Keller may have said this?) And that seems reasonable enough to me. Another one was that someone said if it's 4:30pm and you're asking what's for dinner, you've already lost the battle. Which might not be true for everyone but is definitely true for me.
There are a few--not many--things I feel like I'm really good at cooking. Like hard-boiled eggs. I'm pretty awesome at that. I have a few steps that I go through, but I've done it enough times that I don't need to consult anything to do it. And I'm pretty good with the basic idea of just sautéing an onion and adding some vegetables and maybe some hamburger or sausage, and then maybe a can or two of tomatoes, and some rice or pasta, but I can only do that so often before the people revolt.
So I think I'm kind of going for what you're talking about with getting a rotation of 20 or so meals, preferably with some different spice options so that I can do variations on a theme without much protest. I would also really love to have a chest freezer so I could make some bigger portions and save them for future weeks. Hopefully that will happen soon if we can buy a place. But I think that would alleviate some of the problems of efficiency and monotony--if I make a huge slow cooker meal but serve it every other week for six weeks, it'll seem like a lot more variety than if we have to eat it four times in the next six days. Then maybe on weekends I could be a little more adventurous when time isn't so tight.
And I do have the wrinkle that I'm not at home during the day, but if I commit to thinking ahead, I could make life easier by doing some prep in the morning--like, say, putting some meat in the fridge in a brine in the morning so it's ready to go when I get home.
The 4:30 thing rings true to me in-so-far as it regards good meals. The caveat is that we also have a host of quick meals that we use for dinner on nights when we hit this point (mac and cheese, stuffing+potatoes+meat-on-hand, quick-form tator tot hotdish, french toast, egg sandwiches, etc.).
I actually took note cards and wrote each of the "common 20" things on the card. Then I made a vertical line about a quarter of the way in from the right of the card. There I wrote possible side dishes. Almost every card has "salad" and "rice" on it. Some have "potatoes" some have "roasted vegetables".
In theory I could sit down Sunday with this stack of cards and lay them out in a horizontal line. In theory I could write a sticky note with a new recipe and introduce that into the mix. In theory, meal planning could be pretty easy. In theory I could add "common" cards to the mix over time. Maybe I could add a few per year, especially if the recipes use similar techniques to what I already have in the pile.
Maybe I'll get there someday.
In practice, we have so much built up supply (we do have a chest freezer) that I'm just trying to get through it all. That means there's a little more thought required to plan things.
In theory I enjoy going to the grocery store and meandering around to pick things up.
In practice, I've started using grocery delivery. As a software developer, I almost always rage-quit grocery delivery because their websites are terrible. I'm trying to stick with it this time because it does actually save time in the long run. Time is something I'm very limited on in this stage of life.
So I'd say stick with it! Develop some common things (soups, chili, nice tacos, some simple slow cooker things, some sautés, fried rice [produce killer], etc) to work as your baseline. Throw in fun new recipes from time to time. Get take out once a week - just plan on it and don't stress! Write down your plans weekly to organize your shopping. Make a habit of looking two days in advance throughout the week. You'll likely find yourself using time you would have spent zoning out to prepare some things for upcoming meals.
Note cards sound like a good idea. Notes on the computer never seem to totally work out for me, even though I love, say, using OneNote for grocery shopping lists, and 8.5"x11" sheets of paper are not the best, either.
I hear you on the grocery delivery thing. I've tried it a handful of times and for certain items--mostly pre-packaged food--it works pretty well, but I've had issues with produce orders getting filled as I expected.
Yeah, I wouldn't trust a grocer with fresh produce. I would figure they would be trying to get rid of the oldest produce instead of what I would pick out for myself.
Amazon Prime Now operates somewhat differently than what you're suggesting--Amazon has shoppers that go into the store and pick up what you want to buy. So you don't necessarily have the problem that the grocer is trying to pawn off their worst product, but you are at the mercy of the buyer and how good they are at finding what you're looking for. If they can't find it for whatever reason, then you don't have to pay, but you are also might wind up without a key ingredient that you were looking to use.
I expected that. However, our produce has been pretty good. Happily surprised.
BTW, I actually use Paprika to deal with my groceries and planning. I like the tangible style, but this works best for us syncing things like groceries between each other and such.
Also, on 4 deliveries I only remember one thing being missed, and it wasn't that important.
In fact, I click the "allow substitutions" option, and that's hardly happened. And often we find we have more stuff than we ordered and we aren't charged for it. I'm not sure what's going on, but I can count about $30 worth of stuff that was above what we ordered and we were not charged for it. An extra parmesan cheese block, an extra chuck roast, an extra strip steak, etc. I've enjoyed that part!
oooh. Here's my opportunity to proselytize for Jacques Pepin's technique. The pinprick to the air chamber end and the ice bath are genius and worth the effort.
I'm not yet convinced on the ice bath, but since you suggested, I may try it. The biggest problem for me is actually making ice for the ice bath--my freezer is pretty small and usually stuffed, so making ice is a luxury at the moment.
Do you really pierce the egg before putting it in the boiling water? That seems like you'd wind up with little egg strings in the water.
For me, just getting the eggs close to room temp before I boil them seems to eliminate a lot of my problems. Absent the ice bath, I think it's important to not let the eggs cool to close together. If they're all on top of each other in a container while they are cooling, they're actually sort of cook for a while before they cool.
yes, I use a needle to prick the air chamber end of the egg. It allows expanding air to escape from the pinhole rather than cracking the shell. I have also found that it seems to make peeling the eggs much easier, regardless of the freshness of the eggs. That may be illusory.
the purpose of the ice bath is to get the sulfur compounds to migrate out of the egg rather than discoloring the yoke. I think, from reading this Serious Eats piece , that the truth probably has little to do with the ice bath per se and more to do with the fact that I am (relatively) fast-cooking the eggs, so that I need to fast-chill them to avoid over-cooking the yoke. If you cook your eggs very gently and not too long, then cold tap water should be sufficient to arrest the cooking before the yokes discolor.
Same. Getting proper prep bowls and using them helped tremendously for making meals less stressful. I now read through the recipe a few times and fill up the bowls and dishes with items that need to be added later. I doubt it really is faster, but cooking is streamlined, it feels faster, I burn less stuff, and thus I stop thinking I'm a terrible cook.
I love the idea of peeling and chopping as you go rather than doing it all before you heat a pan, but in practice I've found I'm too slow at peeling and chopping to make it work really well.
Yes, yes, yes. Vegetarian meals in particular involve a lot of chopping, and it goes much better for me if I can get the chopping all done first because I am soooooo slow. Likewise when I bake, I prefer to lay out all my ingredients in the order I'll need them so I don't have to keep going back to different cupboards or the refrigerator for the next thing I'll need. (Plus, recipes for baked goods often call for ingredients such as butter, eggs, and milk to be at room temperature. I usually aim for room-ish temperature and it works out okay.)
Good to know I'm not the only slow chopper around here.
You might know this already, but one shortcut for warming up eggs to room temp is to put them in a bowl of room temp water. When I want to boil my eggs, I find that I get fewer cracked shells if I put them in room temp water while the water in the pot gets up to boiling.
We've also been warming up refrigerated breast milk by putting a bottle of it in a mug of room temperature water and it seems to work pretty quickly.
But I think with baking it's nice to measure the ingredients first because you usually have to be a little more exacting with the quantities. When I do get away with cooking without doing mise en place, it's usually with something where I'm not measuring anything.
yea, baking is a wholenutther topic.
I knead to know if that was supposed to be a pun?
You are trying to start something, but I'm not gonna rise to it.
Rude. I've got a relative like you, but frankly, I think you're worse than my cross aunt.
I need proof that your aunt has hot crossed buns.
You butter be careful. This is a family site.
Things certainly got a little salty there.
of course we'd have a cooking discussion when I can't participate. I read the Bittman article linked, and totally agree with the characterization of Bittman's mistake in assuming everyone can cook the way he does.
In the slaughterhouse I do most of the cooking, but I learned everything I know about cooking from Dr. Chop. Before I met her I knew how to prepare simple meals mostly from boxes and frozen foodstuff. After dating her for a bit it became clear that those kind of meals weren't going to be acceptable in the future. She greatly expanded my pallet, and taught me how to think about ingredients and flavor combinations. Although I feel pretty confident in the kitchen, one of the biggest struggles I've found is knowing when something is 'done'. Done is a subjective thing for a huge portion of available ingredients, and really, really nailing the correct done-ness of a dish is one of the most satisfying things I'll accomplish. As to chopping before / during, I'm somewhere between DocS and mise en place crowd. I'm guessing that we make the same 25 things pretty regularly, and that I've made them so frequently that I have no problem chopping as things are cooking, but when adding a new recipe to the bunch it'll take 3-5 times through the order to make me comfortable eyeballing proportions and chopping on the fly. I'm also no great shakes with the knife. I've gotten better as the years have gone on, but I can't break down meat and veg the way they do on TV. A good friend and well known chef told me once that fast knife skills were only valuable for the prep chef in a production kitchen. He stressed proper technique over speed all day long and twice on sunday. I take that to heart as I chop, knowing that evenly sized pieces cook at the same rate, and that will drastically effect the quality of the finished product.
Likewise. sigh Today is always one of the most draining, high-stress workdays of the year.
Classes start, or kids reporting to campus?
Has to choose a health plan.
Heh
In terms of doneness, I like meathead's thoughts on doneness for meat, namely that if you really want to know, you have to use a thermometer, and that meat doesn't really lose a ton of water/juice by poking it with a thermometer so don't worry too much about that.
But you may be referring more to vegetables and whatnot, which I agree is harder, plus it's partly a matter of taste. It's not the most exciting technique ever, but I actually really like steaming vegetables and it's pretty repeatable--as long as your vegetables are reliably about the same size, once you know how long it takes to steam them the way you like, then once you figure out how long it takes to steam them to the right doneness, you know it forever.
Just in case anyone missed this one:
Saw it originally and it's still glorious.
Can't they just have their own bars?
Buxton isn't the only one with a leg kick adjustment.
I'm not great with sharing Tweets in Tweet format, but the linked images are pretty interesting.
Mike Trout involved in a 3-car crash last night. I guess you could say he "caused" it. Be careful out there, kids.
Sounds like he was traveling too close to the car in front of him, which is probably the most common mistake drivers make.
I've heard him mentioned as a hitting coach that has worked well with Buxton.
Chad Allen who blew up his knee Chad Allen? I'll never forget watching that happen. blarf.